Installation / Operation (continued):
Once I had familiarized myself with the screens I proceed to tweak the fans. I mostly operated in manual mode, where I would simply adjust the voltage (or voltage percentage) supplied, until I had the noise level or cooling performance I desired. In auto mode it is important to select reasonable high and low limits, otherwise the fan might spin full speed anyway, as it tries to achieve an unattainable value.
Turning the fans down really low while in manual mode creates an undesirable surge in the fan speed. It is hard to describe, but every few second the low speed you have selected is interrupted by a pulse of high speed rotation that is also accompanied by a pulse in the lighting, if you happen to have an LED fan installed. Being difficult to explain, please check out this 10 second video clip (please save, then play) I captured of this event. Both fans pictured have been set to 50% voltage, which equates to about 1/3 of the fan's top speed.
Being satisfied that the software worked well for the most part, I decided to further test the reliability of the system. It is hard to trust something new with a task as critical as keeping your CPU fan spinning, so I decided to see what would happen in the event that (a) the USB cable became disconnected from the system and (b) the software was shutdown, both while the system was running and controlling fans.
First, with my fans up and running while under control of the Theta TP-101's software, I simply unplugged the USB cable from the back of my PC. I can see this happening inadvertently by either getting tangled on something or perhaps by just pulling the wrong cable out while trying to remove a different device. I theorized that since power is still being provided to the TP-101 that the control would simply be lost, and that perhaps all fans would just revert to full speed operation. WRONG! As soon as I unplugged the USB cable all fans stopped spinning. This is not good. Imagine that this happened for whatever reason and you happened to have your CPU, GPU, chipset, etc all plugged into it. That could be a huge problem. I now the logic is available that could revert all fans to full speed in such a situation, and that is something that Sunbeamtech should investigate.
The next part of my reliability testing involved simply shutting down the software while everything was running normally. I had one fan running at 90% power and another was turned off through the software, and then I simply clicked to close the Theta TP-101 application. Things initially went better than the previous phase of testing, as the fan that was turned off stayed off, and the fan at 90% stayed at 90%. Satisfied that closing the application (or perhpas the application crashing) didn't impact fan performance, I started the application back up. This is where it gets interesting again... It could not connect to the Theta TP-101 and I could not regain control of the fans. The message shown below would be shown each time I tried to connect, and even rebooting the computer left me without control of the fans, with the one still turned off.
I then unplugged the USB cable and reinserted it... again, no control. Finally I plugged the USB cable into a new port on my motherboard and Windows identified a new USB device while the fans both returned to full speed on their own. Although it is good to see the fans keep going if the software stops, it is definitely not good that you can not regain control of the fans once the software is restarted. These two issues need to be addressed for the safety of systems that the Theta TP-101 is installed on.
The image below is from the "About Me" tab found on the software's menu, and was just interesting to me. It gives the basic information on the device, as well as showing that they have a copyright through 2008. Can you do that?
The Sunbeamtech website offers a link to download software for the TP-101, and I continually check it for updates. Unfortunately, all I get is a "404 Error - Page Not Found" screen instead of an update that will hopefully remedy the few problems.
|
|
